Biochemical reactors such as assay platforms for detecting infectious agents such as venereal diseases are known in the art. In such devices, samples are collected and processed to extract nucleic acids according to a multi-step process. Generally, the multi-step process involves removing excess components or non-desired components from the biological sample, filtering and concentrating the sample, washing the remaining filtered and concentrated sample and providing it to an analysis chamber where it may be exposed to a reaction mixture which allows for the identification of the agent, such as an infectious agent, of interest. However, because isolating the infectious agents is complicated, many conventional platforms require a skilled end user to perform multiple fluidic handling steps after loading the sample. For example, the APTIMA COMBO 2® (available from Gen-Probe, Inc. San Diego, Calif.), which some consider the gold standard for detecting Ct, suffers from limitations, such as requiring multiple fluidic handling steps to process a sample.
Accordingly, what is needed in the art is an assay platform that minimizes the number of fluidic handling steps that an end user must perform, thereby increasing isolation efficiency and reducing erroneous results.